In his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, written in the 1930s, Benjamin gives an analysis of how the technical reproduction of Art affects the status and experience of the original. On the one hand reproduction dilutes the presence of the original and hence depletes its power, and on the other it makes the reproduced image available more widely, especially true in our present age of digital reproduction. Using Benjamin's analyses and concepts as its starting point and touchstones, this lecture explores subsequent theories about technology, and practices that utilise it, whose basic premises Benjamin anticipated.

Key text: Walter Benjamin (2007), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books

I would say in the first place experimental that is
what I am interested in that is making a performance that are experiment with he
spectators

let's start with the easiest one that is the 'sacre
de printemps'

the conductor is doing

I have no education in music so that is really help
to have this perspective

and I have the feeling that is more reacting on the
music than producing the music than - in something

this balance between this very confused moment when
you don't know the cause and what is effect

out this observation could be an interesting thing
to work on this kind of movement as being dance movement on the
music

working for the body for to dance is a very difficult kind of difficulty and it appear that some
of my body was not well construct for this and what happen is I struggle a lot
but what helped me is that because I could not do what I was supposed to as a
dancer then I had to develop and do other things which afterwards was
interesting because this was a way to develop something interesting

It is difficult to do experimental work with a lot
of people because experimental work by definition and it's a pity and it's like
this doesn't invite a big audience if you don't invite a big audience you will
not get a lot of means

so if you don't get a lot of means you can't work
with a lot of people or you have to work with them without paying which is out
of question

so you know this after plays a big role in why
and how you do solo work so after now I can get some support for my work
and subsidies and things like this I alternate very much between work that I do
with people and work that I do solo"

Song Dong : Waste Not " The activity of saving and re-using things is in keeping with the Chinese adage wu jin qi yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil. . . . . Waste Not speaks of the strong bonds between family members and the power of objects to tell stories and shape our lives."

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Ken Wilder makes site-responsive sculptural installations, often
including video projection. “My research focuses on the phenomenological
experience of art, particularly in terms of how artworks structure an
often problematic relation with the beholder...

...My research also attempts to define the phenomenological experience
of video art when it shifts from the cinema to the space of the
gallery.”

Monday, February 20, 2012

Fanon, Subjectivity and Race

Bernice Donszelmann

Feb 20th
4.30pm
Lecture Theatre

Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘The Fact of Blackness’ (1952) explores how subjectivity is experienced as a crisis for the colonized subject within the context of colonial domination. Fanon’s thinking has been very influential within post-colonial theory and the lecture will introduce some of the key ideas presented in this text.

The problem of valuing antiques and collectables is
a never-ending one, and one which we cinstantly address in producing Miller's
Antiques and Collectables handbooks and price
guides. A proce can be affected by many factors, for example:

CONDITION

This is always an important factor and the best way
to learn about a 'perfect' piece should look like is to visit a museum. This is
especially useful if one is looking to buy an expensive item of furniture, as
you will see fine examples of wood, colour and patination. Perfect examples
will, obviously cost more. Damage and restoration is always to be regretted and
the price of that piece must reflect this.

DESIRABILITY AND RARITY

Although a piece may be extremely rare, unless it
is also desirable, it will not necessarily command a high price. When a piece is
extremely rare and desirable its condition is not of prime
importance.

SIZE

In general, smaller pieces of furniture are
favoured by the majority of buyers, with particular attention being paid to
usability rather than to mere decoration. Thus small bookcases, tables and desks
can fetch higher prices than a rarer but larger object that would not
comfortably fit in the modern home. Although the opposite can be true when
looking at porcelain and glass: larger pieces are more difficult to make and
hence can be more desirable and expensive. Larger pieces of silver will also
tend to be more expensive due to the weight of the material.

BUYER'S POWER

One can often be suprised at an auction by a piece
selling for many times its estimated value. There can be several reasons for
this. Perhaps the estimated proce was incorrect. It is also possible that two or
more people bid against each other until the sale price was well above the true
value of the object.

INVESTMENT VALUE

another interesting point to bear in mind when
buying items for the home (furniture being a prime example) is that, once a new
itme has left the shop, its value decreases dramtically. An antique should hold
its value and in some cases the value of the piece will increase over time even
though it is in use.

PUBLIC APPEAL

The fact that items or collections have been given
exposre on television or in a specialist publication will arouse public
interest, and substantially increase demand.

LOCATION

As a large percentage of sales take place from
dealer to dealer, it is obvious that prices vary. It is also possible to pay
more at a provincial auction than in a specialist shop in London or New
york.

learn as much as you can about your subject and
beware something that looks too good to be true - it probably is !

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor

sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is

diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are

some things that occur nearly in common.

The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The

common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The

differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are selected from the work;

they aren't a movement's first principles or delimiting rules. Three-dimensionality is not as

near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends

to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined,

not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all,

producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of

these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything.

Many of the reasons for this use are negative, points against painting and sculpture, and

since both are common sources, the negative reasons are those nearest commonage.

"The motive to change is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change

of state, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness." The positive reasons are more

particular. Another reason for listing the insufficiencies of painting and sculpture first is

that both are familiar and their elements and qualities more easily located.

The objections to painting and sculpture are going to sound more intolerant than they are.

There are qualifications. The disinterest in painting and sculpture is a disinterest in doing

it again, not in it as it is being done by those who developed the last advanced versions.

New work always involves objections to the old, but these objections are really relevant

only to the new. They are part of it. If the earlier work is first-rate it is complete. New

inconsistencies and limitations aren't retroactive; they concern only work that is being

developed. Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed painting and

sculpture. It's not like a movement; anyway, movements no longer work; also, linear

history has unraveled somewhat. The new work exceeds painting in plain power, but

power isn't the only consideration, though the difference between it and expression can't

be too great either. There are other ways than power and form in which one kind of art

can be more or less than another. Finally, a flat and rectangular surface is too handy to

give up. Some things can be done only on a flat surface. Lichtenstein's representation of

a representation is a good instance. But this work which is neither painting nor sculpture

challenges both. It will have to be taken into account by new artists. It will probably

change painting and sculpture.

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the

wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits

the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it. In work before 1946 the edges of the

rectangle are a boundary, the end of the picture. The composition must react to the

edges and the rectangle must be unified, but the shape of the rectangle is not stressed;

the parts are more important, and the relationships of color and form occur among them.

In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt

and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad

and simple and correspond closely to the rectangle. The shapes and surface are only

those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane. The parts are few and

so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordinary sense. A painting is nearly an

entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. The

one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite

form; it is no longer a fairly neutral limit. A form can be used only in so many ways. The

rectangular plane is given a life span. The simplicity required to emphasize the rectangle

limits the arrangements possible within it. The sense of singleness also has a duration,

but it is only beginning and has a better future outside of painting. Its occurrence in

painting now looks like a beginning, in which new forms are often made from earlier

schemes and materials.

The plane is also emphasized and nearly single. It is clearly a plane one or two inches in

front of another plane, the wall, and parallel to it. The relationship of the two planes is

specific; it is a form. Everything on or slightly in the plane of the painting must be

arranged laterally.

Almost all paintings are spatial in one way or another. Yves Klein's blue paintings are the

only ones that are unspatial, and there is little that is nearly unspatial, mainly Stella's

work. It's possible that not much can be done with both an upright rectangular plane and

an absence of space. Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors on the same

surface almost always lie on different depths. An even color, especially in oil paint,

covering all or much of a painting is almost always both flat and infinitely spatial. The

space is shallow in all of the work in which the rectangular plane is stressed. Rothko's

space is shallow and the soft rectangles are parallel to the plane, but the space is almost

traditionally illusionistic. In Reinhardt's paintings, just back from the plane of the canvas,

there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely deep. Pollock's paint is obviously

on the canvas, and the space is mainly that made by any marks on a surface, so that it is

not very descriptive and illusionistic. Noland's concentric bands are not as specifically

paint-on-a-surface as Pollock's paint, but the bands flatten the literal space more. As flat

and unillusionistic as Noland's paintings are, the bands do advance and recede. Even a

single circle will warp the surface to it, will have a little space behind it.

Except for a complete and unvaried field of color or marks, anything spaced in a
rectangle and on a plane suggests something in and on something else, something in its
surround, which suggests an object or figure in its space, in which these are clearer
instances of a similar world - that's the main purpose of painting. The recent paintings
aren't completely single. There are a few dominant areas, Rothko's rectangles or
Noland's circles, and there is the area around them. There is a gap between the main
forms, the most expressive parts, and the rest of the canvas, the plane and the rectangle.
The central forms still occur in a wider and indefinite context, although the singleness of
the paintings abridges the general and solipsistic quality of earlier work. Fields are also
usually not limited, and they give the appearance of sections cut from something
indefinitely larger.

Oil paint and canvas aren't as strong as commercial paints and as the colors and
surfaces of materials, especially if the materials are used in three dimensions. Oil and
canvas are familiar and, like the rectangular plane, have a certain quality and have limits.
The quality is especially identified with art.

The new work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer
to painting. Most sculpture is like the painting which preceded Pollock, Rothko, Still and
Newman. The newest thing about it is its broad scale. Its materials are somewhat more
emphasized than before. The imagery involves a couple of salient resemblances to other
visible things and a number of more oblique references, everything generalized to
compatibility. The parts and the space are allusive, descriptive and somewhat
naturalistic. Higgins' sculpture is an example, and, dissimilary, Di Suvero's. Higgins'
sculpture mainly suggests machines and truncated bodies. Its combination of plaster andmetal is more specific. Di Suverouses beams as if they were brush strokes, imitatingmovement, asKlinedid. The material never has its own movement. A beam thrusts, a

piece of iron follows a gesture; together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic

image. The space corresponds.

Most sculpture is made part by part, by addition, composed. The main parts remain fairly

discrete. They and the small parts are a collection of variations, slight through great.

There are hierarchies of clarity and strength and of proximity to one or two main ideas.

Wood and metal are the usual materials, either alone or together, and if together it is

without much of a contrast. There is seldom any color. The middling contrast and the

natural monochrome are general and help to unify the parts.

There is little of any of this in the new three-dimensional work. So far the most obvious

difference within this diverse work is between that which is something of an object, a

single thing, and that which is open and extended, more or less environmental. There

isn't as great a difference in their nature as in their appearance, though. Oldenburg and

others have done both. There are precedents for some of the characteristics of the new

work. The parts are usually subordinate and not separate as in Arp's sculpture and often

in Brancusi's. Duchamp's ready-mades and other Dada objects are also seen at once

and not part by part. Cornell's boxes have too many parts to seem at first to be

structured.

Part-by-part structure can't be too simple or too complicated. It has to seem orderly. The

degree of Arp's abstraction, the moderate extent of his reference to the human body,

neither imitative nor very oblique, is unlike the imagery of most of the new threedimensional

work. Duchamp's bottle-drying rack is close to some of it. The work of Johns

and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman's reliefs for

example, are preliminaries. Johns's few cast objects and a few of Rauschenberg's works,

such as the goat with the tire, are beginnings.

Some European paintings are related to objects, Klein's for instance, and Castellani's,

which have unvaried fields of low-relief elements. Arman and a few others work in three

dimensions. Dick Smith did some large pieces in London with canvas stretched over

cockeyed parallelepiped frames and with the surfaces painted as if the pieces were

paintings. Philip King, also in London, seems to be making objects. Some of the work on

the West Coast seems to be along this line, that of Larry Bell, Kenneth Price, Tony Delap,

Monday, February 13, 2012

Lecture Theatre
Rupert Norfolk’s work involves subtle investigations of the perceptual and conceptual possibilities of concrete and depicted things. He studied Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and Design, London, and has been associate lecturer in Drawing at Camberwell College of Art since 2007. He lives and works in London.

His work is currently included in The Curator’s Egg, Altera Pars, at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, Painting Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham and Secret Societies - To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence, CAPC - Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux, touring from Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt.

Well it was scrum, a mixture of visitors and exhibitors. Why are they showing, why are we visiting?

I ask because is this kinetic art ?Was this a kinetic art exhibition, it certainly didn't feel like a gallery.

Perhaps it's a place to network, something I always forget to allow for, as well as do.

Those there must be to an extent self selected, and as I still know very little about the subject, it was difficult to draw any conclusions and if there are any gaps, that could just be an absence this year, or maybe the last as I went last year too.

Kinetic implies an engagement with movement - with a technological element. The earliest mechanical technology includes cogs gears and levers etc, all the movement circular in some way. of course we now have the digital, which includes everything of everyperiod, as well as this blog. There did seem to be a divide between the overtley mechanical, and things that ran off laptops as well work that conbined the two, both clearly and the not so clearly.

I remember from last year there seemd to be a lto from those training or trained in engineering, I've no idea how accurate that iompression is. this year I noticed 'Goldsmiths a few times including the phrase 'Computing and the arts' mentioned in the caption for a "Gestalt Circle." I did ask for a catalogue, but the hard copies are 'lost in africa.'

I ask this, as my one experience of trying to produce a kinetic piece was miserable. Months of work, and only to find the thing just managed to function on the night because of a tiny inaccuracy in construction - impossible to avoid in a college studio geared to clay sculpture plaster joinery casting etc, but not precision engineering. Seems to me kinetic art is just for those studying or experienced in engineering.

This seemed to me to lead to work that was clearly decorative or designed to starkly expose scientific principles or to show a geeky love of the mechanical. That's probably not fair, but it was just too packed and noisey to talk to the exhibitors.

I LOVED this. I thought it was beautiful in everyway. the delicacy of the copper wires, gave the whole thing the sense of a three dimensional drawing. I suppose I should have taken a video, but it was so packed [did I emntion that before ?] I didn't want to hog the space.

It's construction is completely open to view. [My piece wasn't - and I was continually asked to turn it off and show people how it worked.]

Nothing on the net but his entry on the exhibitors list. I did snap a video screen with a web address in his space, but it doesn't seem to lead to a website after all.

Another view of the same exhibitors space. I have seen this identical mechanism used for flying elephants, part of the limitations of these mechanism perhaps.

Paul

By Patrick Tresset.

"Paul is a robotic entity that autonomously draws members of the public in a style inspired by Patrick tresset's own drawing manner. Pail utilises some of the technologies and ideas developed in the context of Aikon - II, a research project that investigates the observational sketcjing activity through computational modelling and robotics. Aikon -II is hosted at Goldsmiths' College computing department and is funded in part by a Leverhulme Trust's 3.5 year reseacrh grant [fucking dyslexia !]

There was some relationship between the camera on the right and the drawing arm on the left. there was some work nearby where the connection between drawing and algorithms was more overt, but apart from seeing it draw and the leads that went down to a black box on the floor - I've no idea how this works - or what point was being made other than portrait service that was eagerly being taken up at [I think] £20 a go. I have thought of doing a survey of Leicester Square street portraitists.

Of course drawing machines are nothing new. I found the one below via google. Clearly the mechanism is intentionally hidden in a doll [Anthropomorphic], the drawing made via a pre-determined template, not as above a recognisable portrait of a completely unknown subject. In the one below there is an intention to diguise the mechanism

Oh dear I have caught font change ! end of post . . .

These seem the epitome of an executive toy, beautifully crafted to isolate the purity of egars, there was a sign saying gearmobiles, and a sale had just been made, but googling and the exhibitor list tell em nothing.

In this lecture we will consider the importance of apparently banal occurrences and phenomena to artists of modern and postmodern times. With particular reference to two Freud essays, ‘Parapraxes’ (on ‘slips of the tongue’ and other revealing errors) and ‘The Uncanny’, we will see how Freud’s ideas have special relevance to an age of urban, bourgeois life, and to art influenced by mechanised images – photography and film.